Economics is being rescued from libertarianism. "[...] most economists favor government intervention in the economy in a wide range of areas, including income redistribution, minimum wage laws, environmental regulation, anti-discrimination laws, and others (and that was before the financial crisis!)" [more...]

"Neoreaction is a political ideology supporting a return to traditional ideas of government and society, especially traditional monarchy and an ethno-nationalist state. It sees itself opposed to modern ideas like democracy, human rights, multiculturalism, and secularism." [more...]

Rebuttals to libertarian's five dismissals for problems of extreme inequality: it is market-based just dessert, it is needed for incentives, it is freedom, it is the fault of government, and it is unimportant. All five are wrong. [more...]

"In the case of antibiotic resistance, health care providers who prescribing antibiotics frequently and easily are seeking to benefit each individual patient, while the costs of accumulating resistance to antibiotics are shared across the population. In this way, the pursuit of health for individual way, resistance to antibiotics builds in a way that can impose heavy costs." [more...]

"Whites coming out every day and asserting hugely disproportionate power over blacks through the proxy of wealth is not a cessation of conflict. It is renewed daily conflict, which can either be responded to or not." [more...]

"My thought process lead me to reject libertarianism in general as an ideology, and in the aftermath of that I have come to see left-libertarianism as carrying the fundamental problematic aspects of libertarianism along with it for the most part: obsession with opposition to the state, the adoption of capitalist ideology of the market, reliance on overly simplistic and sociologically neutralized analysis, and so on." [more...]

Gerald MacCallum's interpretation that: ""x is/is not free from y to do/not to do or become/not become z". This allows you to make complete "Subject verb object." sentences out of vaguer philosophical claims. That helps eliminate concealed assumptions. [more...]

Few actions can be undertaken in a society without affecting other people. These effects are called externalities, and they can be beneficial or costly. Econ 101 covers how to deal with externalities, but this is conveniently forgotten for the sake of libertarian argument. [more...]

Isaiah Berlin's famous overview of how two ideas (of the hundreds) of liberty relate to various historical philosophers' ideas. He uses a different definition of positive liberty than prior authors. [more...]

Liberty (also known as freedom) is a glittering generality of libertarian propaganda. Libertarians do not adequately define it, and often think the mistaken ideas of "positive" and "negative" liberty resolve problems. Liberty can be correctly understood as a triadic relation. [more...]

The concepts of positive and negative liberty are not generally agreed upon: major philosophers such as T. H. Green and Isaiah Berlin used different meanings, and modern libertarians have their own bastardized meaning. Many philosophers think the distinction is a word game. American legal philosopher Gerald MacCallum explains liberty as a triadic relationship, with positive and negative being a false dichotomy, different viewpoints of the same thing. [more...]

"Smith’s attacks on the laws that allow the concentration of wealth, primogeniture and entail, are not simply policy prescriptions; they are the lynchpin of his explanation for the delayed growth of Europe before 1700." [more...]

"For Piketty, wealth and capital are ultimately socially constructed categories. [...] The pioneer of this legal constructivist account of market valuation was legal realist Robert Hale. [...] Laws do not just affect valuation of assets. Laws are the very core of asset values." [more...]

"It’s true that some of the people profiting from implicit taxpayer subsidies manage, all the same, to convince themselves and others that they are rugged individualists. But they’re actually welfare queens of the purple sage." [more...]

"[...] it is entirely possible for people who are not professional economists to have sound judgments on economic issues, based on some knowledge of key economic theories and appreciation of the political and ethical assumptions underlying various theories. Very often, the judgments by ordinary citizens may be better than those by professional economists, being more rooted in reality and less narrowly focused. [more...]

All too often, market advocates assume that markets work fine and fixing inequality might make them inefficient. But actually existing markets always depart from perfect models, and already have inefficiencies. Fixing the inequalities might make them more efficient. [more...]

Mark Blaug in his influential book The Methodology of Economics dismissed Ludwig von Mises’ later methodological work and apriorist praxeology as “so idiosyncratic and dogmatically stated that we can only wonder that they have been taken seriously by anyone”. [more...]

Behind the Tea Party movement’s rhetoric of ‘freedom’ versus ‘socialism’ lies a highly co-ordinated network of shadow groups, funded by the likes of billionaire ideologues Charles and David Koch. [more...]

"As diehard a libertarian as Nozick was, even he found himself bothered by the prospect of "patrimonial capitalism" to borrow Piketty's phrase [....]" "Like all of his prior forays into the realm of philosophy, Mankiw has this one entirely wrong." [more...]

Undergraduate economics education is not properly training tomorrow’s policymakers. At the minimum they need some economic history, the diversity of economic viewpoints and training in skepticism of all economic claims. [more...]

Total factor productivity is a residual, the unexplained causes of growth. Blaming government for slow growth is in part wrong, since diffusion of collective "knowhow" seems to be the limiting factor of much growth. [more...]

The right wing lies about job creation, just desert, opportunity and minimum wage. Demand creates jobs, pay rates depend on bargaining power, opportunity requires better education, and minimum wages are good for the economy and the poor. [more...]

"This problem, which economists call inefficient allocation, is present in the market for opportunities as well. [...] To a great degree, access to opportunity in the United States depends on wealth. Discrimination based on race, religion, gender, and sexual discrimination may be on the wane in many countries, but discrimination based on wealth is still a powerful force." [more...]

"Inequality could be a natural outcome of capitalist systems, and market failures could magnify unequal outcomes, but the main point is that economic research has not yet settled these fundamental questions. " [more...]

"The fact that currently wealthy Americans have not, in general, inherited their wealth follows logically from the fact that, in their parents’ generation, there weren’t comparable accumulations of wealth to be bequeathed." [more...]

"That private property is extremely anti-libertarian poses a problem for libertarians, who are notable for their near worship of private property institutions. One of the ways they have taken to getting around this is to talk about the necessity of private property institutions for the avoidance of conflict [...] libertarian institutions are neither necessary nor sufficient for conflict avoidance." [more...]

"You might be tempted to dismiss Bryan Caplan as just another Koch-funded libertarian hack. But I think he may well be the next great libertarian philosopher. Caplanism may represent the future of that near-oxymoron, libertarian thought." (sarcasm) [more...]

"The wrong-headed policies promoted by libertarians and their ilk, who hate any form of tax on the rich, such as inheritance taxes, have ensured that big fortunes in America are getting bigger, and they will play a much more prominent role in the direction of our society and economy if we continue on the present path." [more...]

Inequality is not "natural", nor is it "just deserts": it is in large part a result of policy, which we can change. Economic inequality is harmful to democracy, because it causes political inequality. [more...]

Market efficiency is the great benefit of capitalism, but capitalists hate it because it means low profits. Capitalists battle market efficiency through monopoly, marketing and other assaults on the assumptions of Free Market Theory. [more...]

"Pareto efficiency [is] obviously not a value free criteria. So those who argue that economists should only look for Pareto improvements – changes where no one is made worse off -- are making a value judgement." Focussing on Pareto improvements ignores the diminishing marginal utility of consumption. [more...]

Pareto optimality is often an illusory hope. It does not help us choose WHICH Pareto Optimum we'd want, and there can be many. Pareto improvements assume many things which are not true, such as that inequality doesn't matter. They also are frequently used in bait-and-switch: lump-sum transfers to make sure everybody benefits are often conveniently forgotten. [more...]

Capitalism does not "distinguish between free contracts and contracts into bondage, or between agreements reached by self-debasement or a dignified offer." Thus it will "often require constraints on the scope of freedom of contract and property rights, against the laissez faire ideal." [more...]

3 comments:

The pamphlet 'Agrarian Justice', written by Thomas Paine in 1797, has some interesting quotes on the nature of property which you might like to include alongside those of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, such as:

“There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue.”

“Land, as before said, is the free gift of the Creator in common to the human race. Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally.

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.”

“Agrarian Justice is the title of a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine and published in 1797, which advocated the use of an estate tax and a tax on land values to fund a universal old-age and disability pension, as well as a fixed sum to be paid to all citizens on reaching maturity.It was written in the winter of 1795–96, but remained unpublished for a year, Paine being undecided whether or not it would be best to wait until the end of the ongoing war with France before publishing. However, having read a sermon by Richard Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, which discussed the “Wisdom … of God, in having made both Rich and Poor”, he felt the need to publish, under the argument that “rich” and “poor” were arbitrary divisions, not divinely created ones.

In response to the private sale of royal (or common) lands, Paine proposed a detailed plan to tax property owners to pay for the needs of the poor, which could be considered as the precursor of the modern idea of citizen’s income or basic income. The money would be raised by taxing all direct inheritances at 10%, and “indirect” inheritances – those not going to close relations – at a somewhat higher rate; this would, he estimated, raise around £5,700,000 per year in England.

Around two-thirds of the fund would be spent on pension payments of £10 per year to every person over the age of fifty, which Paine had taken as his average adult life expectancy, with most of the remainder allocated to making fixed payments of £15 to every man and woman on reaching the age of twenty-one, legal majority. The small remainder would then be able to be used for paying pensions to “the lame and blind”. For context, the average weekly wage of an agricultural labourer was around 9 shillings, which would mean an annual income of about £23 for an able-bodied man working throughout the year.

Additionally, “a one-time stipend of 15 pounds sterling would be paid to each citizen upon attaining age 21, to give them a start in life.”The work is based on the contention that in the state of nature, “the earth, in its natural uncultivated state… was the common property of the human race”; the concept of private ownership arose as a necessary result of the development of agriculture, since it was impossible to distinguish the possession of improvements to the land from the possession of the land itself. Thus Paine views private property as necessary, but that the basic needs of all humanity must be provided for by those with property, who have originally taken it from the general public. This in some sense is their “payment” to non-property holders for the right to hold private property.”